IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Karanth, K.; Surendra, A. | |
| Species and sites matter: Understanding human-wildlife interactions from 5,000 surveys in India | |
| 2018 Book Chapter | |
Understanding and managing human-wildlife interactions remains a global conservation priority. Most often, these interactions that emerge from literature focus on negative interactions such as crop damage, livestock loss, property damage, human injury and death. Little effort is exerted towards documenting neutral or positive interactions between people and wildlife. Despite a vast body of literature devoted to understanding human-wildlife interactions - particularly conflict - many fundamental questions remain unanswered. At the core of these interactions is examining how different species influence people's perceptions, attitudes, reporting of conflict and retaliation against species and whether these differences can enable improvements in policy, compensation and mitigation efforts. In our multi-site, multi-species evaluation and comparison of conflict across India, we adopt an approach that focuses on understanding conflict from a species perspective. Specifically, we examine crop and livestock loss reported by households to understand differences at the species and site level. We might expect some herbivore species to exhibit different preferences for specific crops and carnivore species to exhibit different preferences for livestock (such as elephants versus pigs or deer, felids versus canids). We also expect differences in loss experienced to be a function of environmental and landscape-level factors at local site level that influence species differently. Lastly, we are interested in examining if mitigation measures used by people have an effect on conflict. Although conflict is often localised, we are interested in discerning commonalities among groups of species (for example canids or felids) that might help target mitigation efforts. Our large database (over 5,000 surveys) combined with incidents attributed to 12 species (across 11 study sites) in India allows us to explore these questions in a systematic and robust manner. Our efforts will help disentangle the multiple dimensions of human-wildlife interactions, especially with respect to developing targeted species programmes. This is much needed in a country where 81,000 conflict incidents were reported and compensated for in one year, and there exist wide variations in how species are covered by states. |
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